Hi Lawrence,
I agree that ""It From Bit" is not decidable", or rather, that it is a question which belongs to what to me is an outdated paradigm.
I have yet to read an essay which treats the question where all information comes from, how information becomes information. What I mean is this: If there would be only a single charged particle among uncharged particles in the universe, then it wouldn't be able to express its charge in interactions. As it in that case it cannot be charged itself, charge, or any property, for that matter, must be something which is shared by particles, something which only exists, is expressed and preserved within their interactions. If particles, particle properties (its) are both cause and effect of their interactions, of the exchange of bits, if particles only exist to each other if, to the extent and for as long as they interact, exchange information, then you cannot have one without the other nor can one be more fundamental than the other.
If the information as embodied in particle properties and the associated rules of behavior a.k.a. laws of physics must be the product of a trial-and-error evolution, then information only can survive, become actual information when tested in practice, in interactions between its carriers, between actual, physical, material particles, whatever we may mean with 'material'.
What strikes me in all the essays I've read (also of previous contests) is that everybody, without exception, thinks about the universe as an object which has particular properties as a whole and evolves in time, as something we may imagine to look at from the outside and can make statements about, as if it is a mechanism which, once winded up at the bang, after the bang only can unwind in a preordained fashion, as if there is a collection of platonic truths which exist outside the universe, as if there is an absolute, objectively observable reality at the origin of our observations we cannot perceive due to imperfect instruments and to the uncertainty principle.
My point is that if a particle cannot exist, have properties if there's nothing outside of it to interact with, then the same must hold for the universe. The fallacy of Big Bang Cosmology (BBC) is that we can only speak about the properties and state of the universe if there's something outside of it, something it can interact with, and, like the charged particle its charge, something it owes its properties to: if it has been created by some outside intervention. For this reason BBC is an even worse 'theory' than creationism which at least honestly states that, yes, there is Someone outside of it Who created the universe. If a universe which creates itself out of nothing, without any outside intervention has to obey the conservation law which says that what comes out of nothing must add to nothing, then everything inside of it, including space and time somehow must cancel, add to nil, meaning that it has no physical reality as a whole, as 'seen' from the outside, but only exists as seen from within. If in that case it doesn't make sense to speak about the properties it has or the state it is in as a whole, then it also makes no sense to make such statements from within. In other words, we need a completely different approach, an entirely different paradigm if we ever are to comprehend the universe rationally, as opposed to causally, something I'm trying to do in blog, a study which, I'm afraid, is a bit of a mess.
As I argued in a previous essay, this means that we can no longer conceive of the speed of light as the (finite) velocity light moves at, but that c just refers to a property of spacetime, which is something else entirely. (Though you agreed with my statement that we ought to "replace causality with reason ...to understand our world", I hope that you realize, accept that if causality goes out the window, then so does the interpretation of c as the (finite) velocity of light.) In regarding the universe as an object we can imagine to look at from without, a Big Bang Universe (BBU) lives in a time realm not of its own making: as it is the same cosmic time everywhere, here it takes a photon time to travel so here c does refer to the velocity light moves at. In contrast, a Self-Creating Universe (SCU) does not live in a time realm not of its own making: as it contains and produces all time within, here clocks are observed to run slower as they are more distant even if they are at rest relative to the observer. As in a SCU it is not the same time everywhere, here a space distance is a time distance so in this universe a photon bridges any spacetime distance in no time at all, in contrast to a BBU where the photon covers a space distance in (a finite) time. The difference is as subtle as it is crucial to comprehend our universe. Evidently, in a universe where the communication between particles over any spacetime distance is instantaneous, things like the double-slit experiment, the EPR paradox become obvious. The problem is that nobody seems to be able to escape the essentially religious narrative of BBC and start to try to understand the universe from within. Frankly, I'm appalled that everybody takes the word of the heroes of physics as a God's word instead of trying to see whether a different interpretation of observations might solve some of the most glaring contradictions of physics.
Regards, Anton